Timothy's Thoughts

T here seems to be a new trend in the publishing world. At first, I didn’t think it was much of a trend, but now I’m beginning to wonder. If Michael Hyatt does it, I’ll know for sure. I first noticed it when Chip MacGregor did it. Of course, Rachelle Gardner has talked about doing it, but never has. But then Brandilyn Collins announced that she is doing it. Suddenly I feel like I’m in The Neverending Story fighting The Nothing. Could this be the forerunner of the end? If I were to do it, few people would notice. I have a few people who follow my blog. I would hope they would notice—especially if I announced it, but the thing about blogs is that people only notice what you’re doing if you tell them about it. No, even my most faithful readers wouldn’t notice if I did it. That is sad, but true. Maybe that is why they have decided to do it. Their decisions to do it gives us all reason to question whether we should do it. And I’m not sure I can give a good answer for why we shouldn’t. T...

C hip MacGregor has announced that he’s calling an end to his blogging. To paraphrase his reason, he has said all that’s worth saying. It goes without saying that this comes as a disappointment to his 250 daily readers, including myself. I think Chip’s blog is the first literary agent’s blog I followed and it is one of the few that I continue to follow. I understand the feeling that one has said all that’s worth saying. I had those feelings myself and I’ve wondered if some of the time I’ve spent writing posts would’ve been better spent doing something else, but I’m not sure it’s even possible to say all that’s worth saying. To quote from Michael Hyatt’s comment to Chip’s announcement, “You may think you are repeating yourself, but you are not. You are getting first-hand experience building a platform—something that is invaluable in terms of passing it on to your clients.” Michael Hyatt is only partly right. Yes, there’s much more that can be said, but a blog is more like a face to f...

I ’m really frustrated with some of the bloggers I follow. I see most of their blogs through the RSS feed. I’ll decide I want to say something about what they said and I’ll click through to the blog. So then I can’t actually comment because it takes so long to load all of those widgets they’ve got running on the side of their blog. Do I really care which books they’ve been reading or what songs they’ve been listening to? No, I don’t. So why show it to me? Some of that stuff is okay, but some of it doesn’t work very well. And the only reason much of it exists is as a way to advertise something the widget creator is selling. He gets free advertising because some writer wants to put her bookshelf on her blog. That stuff will kill a blog. So cut it out!

S everal of the writers for the blogs I follow have been off at the ACFW Conference, so much of last week and maybe this week they’ve been having all these “guest blogs.” Am I the only one who just skips over a blog when I see that it’s a guest blog? It’s not that I don’t think the people they invite to write for their blog don’t have something meaningful to say, but it’s a little like calling someone on the phone and getting the answering machine instead. It may be that I can tell the answering machine what I needed to tell the person just as easily, but it’s disappointing because I was looking forward to talking to the person and all I get is the machine. When I visit a blog that I’ve enjoyed reading and see a guest blog, I’m disappointed because I know the blogger isn’t going to post anything today. To rectify this problem, I suggest we bloggers adopt the following rule: Never use a guest blog to replace a regularly scheduled blog post. If you post on Monday, Wednesday and Frida...

A ny one who has been reading this blog long knows that I don’t do reviews often. You also know that I don’t like guest bloggers. And you also know that I’m trying to obey my better judgment and not write bad reviews. Today, I think I can manage that last one, but the other two go out the window. I’m going to write a review and of all things, it is going to be about a guest blog post. I don’t usually read guest posts, even when they appear on blogs that I read daily, such as Rachelle Gardner’s blog. If I do happen to read the post, I certainly don’t comment. That just encourages them. But the other day I saw a guest post on Rachelle’s blog and I read it—at least, enough to get the general idea—then I left a comment. Why? What is so special about this particular post that is different from most guest posts? The post is titled Would You Pay More For An Agent? and it is written by Chuck Sambuchino. The first thing we notice about this post is that it fits the general theme of Rachelle’s ...

M ark this one down in the you’ve got to be kidding me category. Thomas Nelson has announced that they are rebranding Book Review Bloggers as BookSneeze. I know Mike Hyatt is a fan of Seth Godin and all of that, but this takes the cake. The name doesn’t fit the image I have of Thomas Nelson. When I think of Thomas Nelson, I think of a old respectable company. I think of Bibles. I think of quality. What I don’t think of is snot coming out of my nose—until now. I joined Book Review Bloggers and review a few books through that program. I have one book that I haven’t had time to review. I was thinking of rushing through it and writing a review, but with the name change, I might just forget it. (Thomas Nelson, you can have the book back, if you want it. I would just as soon never say that I am reviewing a book through the BookSneeze program.) 

O kay, here’s the thing. If you blog, having a guest blogger is a good thing for a number of reasons. It gives you a break. It attracts readers from the other person’s blog. It gives the appearance of an endorsement of your blog. It helps you develop a friendship with your guests. With so many reasons why we would want to have guest bloggers, you might find it odd that I don’t like guest bloggers. That may be too strong of a statement. It isn’t like I’m going to go short-sheet their beds or something, but I’m not a big fan of guest blogging, in general. I see a number of problems with guest blogging. The first has to do with my personal experience with guest bloggers on other blogs. I follow a number of blogs and some of them have guest bloggers. When I see that a guest blogger has written the post, I tend to ignore or skim the post, even when the guest blogger has a blog that I follow. On top of that, guest posts tend to be longer than they really need to be. It’s as if the guest blog...

T he news of the day is that Amazon.com has settled the lawsuit concerning deleting copies of an illegal copy of "1984" from Kindle. [1] You may recall that my big concern over this issue was the possibility that it would open the door for the courts to prevent bloggers and other electronic content creators from deleting material they place on publicly accessible computers. Had the courts ruled in Justin Gawronski's favor, I still think it would have opened the door for people who link to our websites to sue us if we break the links they have on their websites. This settlement isn't great for authors and content owners, but it's livable. Essentially, if Amazon.com puts your stuff on Kindle and you didn't want it there, they aren't just going to delete it upon your request. Instead, you will have to get a court order. That will likely require a lawyer and some fees, but if your lawyer knows what he is doing, he can probably convince Amazon.com to pay that...

F acebook is an interesting place. It's the kind of place where you can know what your friends are thinking, even before they think it. There’s one particular fellow I have followed on Facebook and Twitter who often talks about his experiences with various companies and often he does so hoping that someone from that company will see his comment on rectify the problem. I suppose I got drawn into this concept somewhat, but every time I’ve tried that, I’ve felt guilty and have wondered how this fellow has felt comfortable doing that. I don’t know why it took so long to sink in, but doing this is essentially gossip. Yeah, we might think that we are motivating the company or person to “do the right thing,” but it still amounts to gossip. If we are going to talk about a bad customer service experience online, shouldn’t we first exhaust our opportunities to resolve the issue before telling others about it? It’s one thing to warn people about a company that is consistently bad or has a...

W hat happened to my backlog? As I write this, I have just realized that I am down to one regular blog post waiting for its scheduled time of publication. In the past, I’ve had so many that I wondered if some of the posts would ever see the light of day. It kept growing and growing, but as I look at it now, it is nearly gone.   It isn’t from a lack of ideas. Over the past several weeks, I have begun several posts that I discarded before I buttoned them up. Some I deleted, while others I saved as drafts, but they too will disappear in time. Somehow, all those post disappeared and I’m down to nothing. Check back tomorrow anyway. Yes, there will be a post. I don’t know what it will be, but there will be one and I promise it won’t be just a repost of something I already put out here. That isn’t my thing. I know a lot of people like doing that, but not me. Maybe Friday will come early this week and I’ll let one of my characters talk. I don’t know, but I’ll think of something. ...

R ecently, I have noticed a surge in interest for my book Church Website Design . I don’t know about everyone else, but when I see book sales rise, it gives me a renewed interest in the subject matter. Now, I’m not going to talk about church website design , exactly, but I am going to talk about that big R you see to the left and tell you more than you probably wanted to know. Now, if you know anything about HTML, there isn't a drop caps tag. To get that, you have to use Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). In the case of this R, the style is defined inline. I will note that there are some good reasons why you should avoid doing that, but it is the easiest way to go for the typical blogger, since it doesn't require messing with the template or files on the server. This R is accomplished using the span tag and has the following form: <span style="font-size: 100px; float: left; color: #477fba; line-height: 70px; padding-top: 2px; font-family: times, serif, georgia"...

W hat do all the big names in Christian publishing—names like Rick Warren, Robin McGraw, Mike Huckabee and Max Lucado—have in common? No, it isn’t doctrine. Yes, they all have a huge platform , but that isn’t it. No, the thing they have in common is that they don’t blog.  Cindy commented yesterday about how it might be interesting to see whether successful authors have more followers who are readers or followers who are writers. The only way to answer that is to ask, so I decided to compose an e-mail message to send to each of the top writers. I went to Mike Hyatt’s blog, where I remembered that he had a list of the top Christian authors, thinking that would be a good place to start. I expected find their e-mail addresses on their websites and if I didn’t I would see if I could contact them through their publishers. As I moved down the list, I quickly noticed the problem. Not only did they not have e-mail addresses, they don’t have blogs. It would do me no good to ask about peop...

W hat does it take to build a platform online? I look at blogs and I ask myself why one blog is successful and another isn't. I particular, I look at the blogs run by literary agents and I compare them to those run by authors. As a general rule, literary agents have blogs that have several times the followers that successful authors have. How do we explain this? There is a theory that as long as you write great posts, your blog will succeed. I won’t say that literary agents aren’t capable of writing great post, but if we are looking for someone who can write “great” posts, doesn’t is stand to reason that the typical bestselling writer should be able to write better posts than the typical literary agent ? But the numbers don’t add up that way. The reason this happens is fairly simple. Literary agents are doing what is essentially selling bottled water in the desert . If you’re out in the desert with a bunch of people, the guy selling bottle water is a popular guy. What literary...

H ow we handle comments on our blogs and websites greatly influences the experience people have when they visit. Yesterday, Rachelle Gardner posted about her Comment Policy . Mine, as you may have noticed when you commented, are somewhat more relaxed than hers. To summarize mine: 1. Be Nice (Okay, that pretty much says it all, but I’ll ad the second for clarity.) 2. Don’t say anything inappropriate or mean spirited to my guests. But this post isn’t about the rules of commenting on my blog. What I want to discuss is my philosophy on blog comments . The topic of blog comments has been going around lately and I’ve noticed that several people disagree with me. I thought it would be good to put my thoughts out there. Maybe I’ll persuade a few people to my point of view. Or maybe someone will show be the error of my ways and I change my mind, but this is my philosophy thus far. Comment on Your Own Posts If you blog, you know that the only sure way you have of knowing if people are actuall...

I found a new toy for blogging. I was looking for another piece of software when I saw Windows Live Writer . This tool is designed for editing blog posts offline and then posting them to your blog. I have only tried it with Blogger, so I don’t know how well it works with other blogs, but I’m impressed. I believe it was Michael Hyatt who recommended BlogJet. I tried it and I wasn’t impressed enough to stop writing my posts in Word and then copying the text to my blog. The main problem I had with BlogJet was that 90% of the time it wouldn’t post to the blog and I had to copy the text anyway. So far, Windows Live Writer hasn’t failed on me and I have posted to my blog several times. Windows Liver Writer also has some features that BlogJet didn’t seem to have. It pulls the template from the blog so that you can see approximately what the text will look like when you post. It handles multiple blogs. It is extensible. Is there a feature you would like to have that just isn’t there? Y...

I don’t know if anyone has done a study of how long a blog post should be, but for me, 250 words is a good number to remember and no more than 500. At some point I signed up for the RSS feed for Randy Alcorn’s blog. He often has these 700 word monstrocities. I don’t even bother to scan his text as I scoll through it. I aught to dump the RSS feed, but I keep thinking he’ll say something that interests me. When people talk about this subject, they often say things like, people don’t have the attention span they once had . I don’t believe the evidence bears out that assumption. There are gamers who will spend days, nearly uninterupted, trying to complete all levels of a computer game. Huge attention span! I mean huge! More than once, I have read through more than 100 pages of an online PDF document because I believed it would help me with my job. The problem isn’t that people have shorter attention spans. The problem content and format . Creating...

A ctually, she didn’t, but that’s beside the point. And actually, I’m spending some time with my parents this week, along with attending an associational meeting in Missouri. One of the things we hope to do is engage the readers of our blog. Some blogs do this better than others. Rachelle Gardner has done well at engaging her readers with her blog, but the idea behind the title comes from a thought I had while watching a video of Michael Hyatt talking about blogging. Don’t get me wrong, Mike is an interesting speaker, but as I watched I kept taking notes because I knew I wouldn’t remember what he said. When he got to the part about engaging readers I thought about the differences between the lecture he was giving and how I teach a Sunday school class. Mike is a better speaker than I will ever be, but I can’t help but wonder how many people walked out of that room and all they remembered was that Mike sent his Google password over Twitter. The problem...

A s you read this, I am in Branson, Missouri, catching up with some hold friends, making new friends and listening to reports of what God has been doing in the BMAA. Surrounding me are hundreds of preachers and church staff workers along with their wives. I also have some work to do while I’m here. But while I’m off enjoying myself, allow me to share my thoughts on attracting people to a blog. One of the reasons authors blog is to connect with readers and even attract more readers. When I began to blog, I had high hopes that I could write posts that would attract people who would enjoy reading my novels. I’ve seen novelist who have significant interaction with their readers, but in almost every case, the readers built the blog rather than the blog attracting the readers. I would love to spend more time telling people when my next book is coming out. Discussing the how closely  For the Love of a Devil  is based the book of Hosea or where my next book sign...

B arring any unexpected events, I’m either on my way or packing to go to the Annual Meeting of the Baptist Missionary Association of America in Branson, Missouri. I’ll have my laptop with me this year, but the meeting schedule will prevent me from spending much time online. For that reason, I am writing this post in advance. I know it’s the practice of some to repost blogs when they are away. That’s fine for them, but I don’t care for it. If people want to find read what I’ve previously written, they’ll use Google. A few years ago, I was traveling with my pastor and his wife. He turned to me from where he sat in the passenger’s seat and said, “I have my sermon prepared for next Sunday. I sometimes prepare weeks in advance. Some preachers don’t like doing that because they want to preach what the Lord lays on their heart for that week. I believe the Lord can lay a sermon on a preacher’s heart weeks in advance just as easily as he can the day before.” On other occasions, he has mentioned...

You may have noticed that I have been taking a different approach to blogging recently. On my more recent blog posts you will see a corny little image, similar to the one seen here. One thing I’ve noticed is that it is easier to read a blog when the blog has images attached. Some people “borrow” stock images for their blog posts, even with the copyright watermark still attached. My recent approach is to draw the image before I write the post. We’ll see how long I keep this up, but it is working for now. My hope is that the images will help to illustrate whatever point I am trying to make. Rather than using stock photos, I have been drawing images, often with cartoon like text to help bring the point home. While I don’t usually see stick figures in my head, I think showing a picture of what I am thinking will make it much easier for people to understand. One of the things I have noticed is that if I start with the text I have a tendency to over write in order to describe something. By t...